Robert Fulford's column about Pol
Pot

On the day after Pol Pot's death was announced, the New York
Times ran a front-page headline: "Why? Pol Pot Takes His
Answer With Him." The Times wanted to know why, about 20
years ago, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed roughly a million
people, a seventh of his fellow Cambodians. The Times article
quoted a Cambodian who also wondered: "I still want to know...why
Pol Pot killed so many people."

It seems strange that the Times, and its Cambodian source,
should ask that question at this late date. Asking it now betrays
a shaky grasp of history or a squeamish evasion of the implications
of ideology. The truth is, Pol Pot did it for the good of
humanity. He did it for the future. He did it because it was his
revolutionary duty. He did it because he learned in youth that
killing was a legitimate political technique. And of course he did
it because killing, once started, is not a habit easily broken.

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao--these were the great
society-transforming killers whose path Pol Pot followed. Like
him, they all had clear reasons for what they did. They were full
of passionate justification, angry self-righteousness. Always they
had (and their successors have) euphemisms. Dictatorships torture
language while torturing people. Class war. Final solution.
Cultural revolution. Ethnic cleansing.

Many of these killers acquired overseas fan clubs; some still have
them. Even when their ideas have proven fatuous and futile, even
when murder has corrupted them and turned their lives rancid, they
continue to attract admirers. Many educated and prosperous people,
entirely free to do otherwise, have casually accepted communist
mass murder. Millions, in fact, have embraced the murderers as
progressive forces, while occasionally regretting their "excesses,"
a term that usually means outright evil. "You can't make an
omelette without breaking eggs," says the old French proverb.
Communists loved that metaphor, loved its clever combination of
homely wisdom and vicious cynicism. Pol Pot also had metaphors:
"We will burn the old grass and the new will grow."

Long after Josef ("A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is
a statistic") Stalin had proven himself a moral as well as an
economic failure, intellectuals around the world continued to think
killing would solve social problems. The case of Frantz Fanon is
instructive. In the 1950s Fanon was a radical psychiatrist working
for Algerian independence. He conceived the idea that violence is
not only necessary but beneficial. He believed Third World
peasants could liberate themselves by "collective catharsis." It
was a question of mental health: killing their oppressors would
free them psychologically from the bonds of colonialism. In
Fanon's defence, we can say that he did not lack imagination.
Perhaps he didn't dream of Cambodia, but he acknowledged that
revolutionaries would, at least for a while, commit violence
against one another. Even so, they would be liberated from the
despair of colonialism. Those who survived.

Intellectuals all over the world read Fanon's books, quoted him,
and nodded solemnly. God knows how many deaths his madness helped
justify. As George Orwell remarked in a similar context, "You have
to be a member of the intelligentsia to believe things like
that--no ordinary man could be such a fool...." Or take such a
fool seriously.

But Fanon's ideas became fashionable in left-wing circles in Paris
during the 1950s, when the young Saloth Sar, not yet renamed Pol
Pot, was learning the revolutionary's trade. Violence had acquired
an exhilarating chic, it had become a soul-lifting act. The 1960s
movies made by Jean-Luc Godard are populated by characters
intoxicated by Fanon-like notions. Godard, who was then among the
world's most influential moviemakers, knew those young would-be
revolutionaries were fools, but even as he displayed their
foolishness to his audiences he winked indulgently.

In the 1950s, after some East Germans demonstrated against the
communist regime, a solemn ass in the government declared that the
people had disappointed the leadership. Bertolt Brecht wrote a
rueful poem suggesting that the government, being displeased,
should dissolve the people and elect a new people. It was a joke,
and had no effect on anyone. But curiously, that's how certain
governments began thinking about what they called the masses. You
citizens (they said in effect) are not up to the standard of the
government. You must be improved.

This was a natural and inevitable extension of the belief that a
government can transform the people, reshape them as human beings
fit for the new society that the government is planning. If the
masses do not agree, it's only because they don't know what's good
for them. They are uninstructed. Even if they think they are
happy, they are wrong, suffering from "false consciousness." That
means they need re-education and forced labour. A certain number
may die; things occasionally get out of hand.

Possibly these are among the facts that future centuries will
remember most vividly about our time. Perhaps Pol Pot will one day
be seen not as an aberration but as a characteristic figure of his
era. If the world recognizes the madness in the policy of killing
for social improvement, civilization may one day look upon the 20th
century with utter contempt. We can only hope so.